Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to wide bandwidth radio systems designed to adapt to various global radio standards and, more particularly, to a cellular radio architecture that employs a combination of a single circulator, programmable band-pass sampling radio frequency (RF) front-end and optimized digital baseband that is capable of supporting all current cellular wireless access protocol frequency bands.
Discussion of the Related Art
Traditional cellular telephones employ different modes and bands of operation that have been supported in hardware by having multiple disparate radio front-end and baseband processing chips integrated into one platform, such as tri-band or quad-band user handsets supporting global system for mobile communications (GSM), general packet radio service (GPRS), etc. Known cellular receivers have integrated some of the antenna and baseband data paths, but nevertheless the current state of the art for mass mobile and vehicular radio deployment remains a multiple static channelizing approach. Such a static architecture is critically dependent on narrow-band filters, duplexers and standard-specific down-conversion to intermediate-frequency (IF) stages. The main disadvantage of this static, channelized approach is its inflexibility with regards to the changing standards and modes of operation. As the cellular communications industry has evolved from 2G, 3G, 4G and beyond, each new waveform and mode has required a redesign of the RF front-end of the receiver as well as expanding the baseband chip set capability, thus necessitating a new handset. For automotive applications, this inflexibility to support emerging uses is prohibitively expensive and a nuisance to the end-user.
Providing reliable automotive wireless access is challenging from an automobile manufacturers point of view because cellular connectivity methods and architectures vary across the globe. Further, the standards and technologies are ever changing and typically have an evolution cycle that is several times faster than the average service life of a vehicle. More particularly, current RF front-end architectures for vehicle radios are designed for specific RF frequency bands. Dedicated hardware tuned at the proper frequency needs to be installed on the radio platform for the particular frequency band that the radio is intended to operate at. Thus, if cellular providers change their particular frequency band, the particular vehicle that the previous band was tuned for, which may have a life of 15 to 20 years, may not operate efficiently at the new band. Hence, this requires automobile manufactures to maintain a myriad of radio platforms, components and suppliers to support each deployed standard, and to provide a path to upgradability as the cellular landscape changes, which is an expensive and complex proposition.
Known software-defined radio architectures have typically focused on seamless baseband operations to support multiple waveforms and have assumed similar down-conversion-to-baseband specifications. Similarly, for the transmitter side, parallel power amplifier chains for different frequency bands have typically been used for supporting different waveform standards. Thus, receiver front-end architectures have typically been straight forward direct sampling or one-stage mixing methods with modest performance specifications. In particular, no prior application has required a greater than 110 dB dynamic range with associated IP3 factor and power handling requirements precisely because such performance needs have not been realizable with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) analog technology. It has not been obvious how to achieve these metrics using existing architectures for CMOS devices, thus the dynamic range, sensitivity and multi-mode interleaving for both the multi-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is a substantially more difficult problem.
Software-defined radio architectures do not currently exist in the automotive domain, but have been proposed and pursued in other nonautomotive applications, such as military radios with multi-band waveforms. However, in those areas, because of vastly different waveform needs, conflicting operational security needs and complex interoperability requirements, a zero-IF approach has proven technically difficult. Known software defined radios have typically focused on backend processing, specifically providing seamless baseband operations to support multiple waveforms. The modest performance specifications haven't demanded anything more aggressive from front-end architectures. Straight-forward direct sampling or 1-stage mixing methods have been sufficient in the receiver. For software defined radios that employ delta-sigma modulators, the component function is commonly found after a down conversion stage and has low-pass characteristics. With regard to the transmitter, parallel multiple power amplifier chains to support differing frequency bands and waveform standards have been sufficient for meeting the requirements.
As radio systems evolve toward compact multi-function operation, the dynamic range of the receiver is heavily challenged by having to detect a very weak desired signal in the presence of the radios large transmit signal. Less than ideal antenna reflection and imperfect transmit-to-receive isolation may present a fairly large transmit signal at a frequency near the smaller desired receive signal frequency. The impact of this imperfect isolation and antenna reflection has traditionally been resolved through the use of static surface acoustic wave (SAW) or bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters. However, these types of filters are generally employed for fixed frequencies and do not support a reconfigurable radio architecture.
To obtain the benefits of a full duplex mode operation, i.e., receiving and transmitting at the same time, it is necessary to eliminate or greatly reduce the level of self-interference cause by the transmit signal. In the recent literature, several cancellation schemes have been identified almost all of which have been narrow band approaches given the nature of the transmit/receive amplifiers, and most have been directed towards interference from external sources as opposed to self-interference cancellation. The techniques for external interference cancellation necessarily have to rely on unknown signal estimation methods, and thus cannot achieve the same dynamic range that is required for wideband sigma-delta modulations applications.
Other related approaches for transmit signal cancellation require multiple antennas to effectively move the duplexing problem from the frequency and/or time domain to the spatial domain, which relies on the placement of the antennas to null the interfering signal. With the desire for smaller transceiver designs and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integration requiring its own antenna resources, having multiple antenna dedicated to the function of self interference cancellation is unattractive.
A handful of RF cancellation schemes requiring only a single antenna have been identified in the art. In these approaches, a sample or replica of the transmitted signal is modified and combined with other signals entering the receiver to cancel the self-interfering signal. The proposed solutions have been for narrow band application and either suffer insertion loss or require extra hardware and are expensive.
Delta-sigma modulators are becoming more prevalent in digital receivers because, in addition to providing wideband high dynamic range operation, the modulators have many tunable parameters making them a good candidate for reconfigurable systems. Interesting possibilities occur for transmit signal cancellation when a bandpass delta-sigma modulator is used as the front end of an ADC. Wider-dynamic range operation can be achieved by moving the low noise amplifier (LNA) in the receiver front-end after the primary feedback summation node in the modulator so that the signal into the LNA is the error or difference between the input and the estimated or quantized version of the input signal. Derived from the quantization error, it can be found that the input power is reduced by the number of DAC bits. Accordingly, the required input intercept point decreases by the same amount for a fixed dynamic range.
Since the performance requirements on a feedback DAC are the same as the overall modulator, the larger the number of bits in the DAC, the harder it is to meet the dynamic range. For those applications where it is not feasible to have a high bit resolution DAC an alternate technique for cancellation is needed. For example, it is possible to leverage the modified modulator architecture to augment RF cancellation by replicating the transmit signal, and then subtracting it along with the quantized estimation signal. The transmitter directly synthesizes the RF signal in the digital domain so that the digital data is readily available. The transmit data sequence is then converted to an analog signal with an N-bit replica DAC. The feedback DAC, the transmit DAC, and the replica DAC have a particular multi-bit resolution. Although there are no constraints on the multi-bit resolution, having the bit resolution of the replica DAC be equal to or less than the transmit DAC is the most efficient implementation and offers the highest potential for circuit and design reuse. The digital data will be modified by the adaptive processing function so that the replicated transmit signal, particularly the phase and strength, is a better approximation to the unwanted signal arriving at the receiver input.